Arrêt sur image(s) : « The Old Icons » de Seamus Heaney

• Main Author: Pascale Amiot-Jouenne
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Maison de la Recherche en Sciences Humaines 2014-06-01
• Series: Revue LISA
• Subjects: icon; ekphrasis; Heaney Seamus; nationalism; mythification
• Online Access: http://journals.openedition.org/lisa/5985

Published by Seamus Heaney in Station Island in 1985, “The Old Icons” discretely distinguishes itself from the poems gathered in the last section of the volume. Within six concise, chiselled stanzas, the writer focuses on three pictures closely associated with the history of Ireland: an etching featuring a patriot on the eve of his execution, an oleograph picturing an outlawed mass and a painting showing a committee of rebels among whom an informer is standing. This paper aims at exploring the dialogue established between image and word in the poem, so as to highlight the way the visible, the readable and the invisible interact and analyse how both the poet as “informed” observer and the reader as “naive” viewer find themselves involved in the continuum of text and history. As the title suggests, the three pictures are not fictitious works of art, but icons of Irish republicanism and Catholicism associated with the 1798 Rebellion, which anchored the poet’s attachment to the nationalist cause. In an ambivalent process of demythologising, the latter is led to question both his emotional and cultural conditioning and the transience of the verdicts of history.